Krissy Cela
Ads the poster girl for living room workouts, who's built a fitness empire worth Millions. Here ,the PT and founder of the Tone & Sculpt app talks hard work, hard knocks and the power of finding your why
She got her first job washing pots at 14 – just 12 years later, she’s running a fitness empire
This isn’t the first time Krissy Cela’s been in my living room. Since swapping my sessions at a London gym for workouts wedged between the couch and the kitchen, Krissy’s face – via her Tone & Sculpt app – has been beamed into my South London flat more times in the past year than Chris Whitty’s. Thrice weekly workouts, in which she’s coached me through lunges, press-ups, and (ugh) Bulgarian split squats, have kept my spirits up on days when an optimistic outlook was harder to come by than a kettlebell; and the structure of a plan delivered a sense of control in a time of, frankly, chaos. Only, on this occasion, the personal trainer is not a GIF on my phone, perched precariously on one corner of my yoga mat, but a head-and-shoulders figure on my laptop screen, answering my questions and laughing politely at my jokes.
Cosy in a grey tracksuit, Krissy leans back in her chair, her background offering me a window into the light, bright office in London’s Old Street that Tone & Sculpt calls home. It’s a month after her WH photo shoot, and while restrictions meant I wasn’t able to attend, I’ve been reliably informed by members of the team who were that Krissy was on fizzing-with-energy form as she dutifully threw punches and performed lunges (and that the giant box of doughnuts she ordered for the team went down an absolute treat). I’m ready with my questions about her chart-topping fitness app, clothing line and newly released book, but despite the fact that we’ve never actually trained together one-on-one, since I use her app, Krissy considers herself my trainer – and she wants to talk about her client’s progress. When I mention my motivation is waning, she asks not what my goals are, but why I have them. ‘When is the last time someone truly asked you that, and you started really thinking about it?’ she asks me. ‘The answer’s probably not really ever…’
This is the key, she explains, to getting a workout done when your motivation is MIA. I’m embarrassed that I’ve given this question so little thought before, but I file the nugget away for later, appreciative of the small glimpse into the approach that sets Krissy apart from other big name PTS; an approach that costs her countless hours in replies to comments, DMS and forum posts, but one her ‘familia’ – as she refers to her 2.4m Instagram followers – can’t get enough of.
Now 26, Krissy emerged as a fitness influencer in her early twenties, when she was still one of the few women venturing into the weights room. She regaled an ever-growing following with her gym trials and errors, and her content evolved from a way to hold herself accountable, to exercise videos her fans could follow along with.
‘I’ve always had such a hunger to work and really go for it’
Within a few years, Krissy had qualified as a personal trainer, released several PDF training guides and – battling to meet the demand for her signature 28-minute Sculpt It circuit-style workouts – took the plunge and launched her own app. Three years since it hit digital shelves, Tone & Sculpt has been downloaded more than 500,000 times worldwide, and now has over 50,000 active monthly users. Little wonder then, that she’s regularly dubbed the female Joe Wicks. And while it’s a comparison she’s reluctant to comment on, she has endless admiration for her industry colleague. ‘I think everything Joe Wicks has achieved in helping as many people as possible stay active is empowering and he will always have my support,’ she says.
WORKING IT OUT
In a time when home workouts reign supreme, it would be easy to assume that success fell into Krissy’s lap, but Kristjana Eleny Cela is no stranger to hard work. The Celas left Albania in search of a better life when she was a baby. They spent four years in Athens, where her parents worked on
a chicken farm, before migrating to the UK and settling in Hertfordshire. Krissy started school soon after, but it wasn’t an easy transition. ‘It was such a struggle as I couldn’t speak English at all,’ she recalls. ‘It made me have to work twice as hard to constantly prove my belonging here and to fit in, I guess. But, fundamentally, I always had such a hunger to work and really go for it.’
And work, she did. After lying about her age, she got her first job at 14, as a pot washer, then later as a waitress at local restaurants, before becoming a checkout assistant at
M&S – which helped her fund her law degree at London South Bank University. It was around this time, age 19, when, reeling from a break-up, she took herself down to her local branch of Anytime Fitness. And after a rocky start, during which she googled
‘what is the machine that has a chair and you put your feet on?’ (it was a leg press), the gym quickly became her happy place. She’d squeeze in hour-long, cardio-heavy sessions between lectures and shifts, continuing her fitness education via Google. But it was the early 2010s – when aesthetics trumped athleticism – and that messaging affected her. ‘I had seen pictures of what I thought was a desirable body, and that’s what I wanted. The more I chased it, the more stressed I got,’ she shares. ‘At the time, there wasn’t anyone saying, “Hey, it’s about sustainability, it’s about longevity”… it was all calorie-torching workouts with keto diets. I tried everything you could possibly imagine. I tried juice diets, I tried no-carb diets, I tried no sugar, I tried no fat, I tried running for one hour on the treadmill every day.’ There was no
‘aha’ moment, she tells me, but a gradual realisation that focusing on what her body could do, as opposed to how it looked, made her feel more powerful. ‘It wasn’t until I started really understanding weights – form, reps and sets and different techniques and styles of training – that I understood that more intensity did not mean better.’
She still had her sights set on a career in law when, in 2016, she asked her then-boyfriend Jack Bullimore to film her in the gym, and started posting the videos to Instagram. And what began as an exercise in form-checking quickly evolved into a community. ‘I was just posting here and there, and I just had friends and family [following me]. And then, all of a sudden, I got this influx of messages from women who were like, wow, can you teach us some more?’ The more she shared, the more her following grew. By 2017, she’d been offered endorsement deals with Women’s Best and Gymshark, and when her followers started clamouring for workout guides, she obliged – adding a personal training diploma to her workload. At 150,000 followers, she quit her waitressing job, and by the time she finished her law degree in 2018, she knew her heart wasn’t in it any more. Together with Jack, she ploughed every penny she’d earned from her workout guides and brand deals into developing the app that would become Tone & Sculpt in January 2019.
HEAVY LIFTING
It was an instant success, hitting the 250,000 downloads mark within eight months. As we talk, a handful of Tone & Sculpt workers dart in and out of view (she kept the office open for employees who don’t have a suitable working environment at home). Jack is among them, though he’s no longer her boyfriend. After a well-documented four-year romance – and a proposal during a sun-soaked holiday in Tulum, Mexico, in 2017 – they ended their relationship in 2019. I’m curious to know how it’s been running a company with her ex. Krissy chuckles at my question and then calls, ‘Jack! What’s it like working with you?’ ‘Lovely,’ comes a muffled reply. I cringe, but Krissy shares none of my discomfort. ‘I would not be here today without him,’ she says. ‘And what we’ve created is so big. We have thousands of users… this is no longer me and him.’
She still lives in the Hertfordshire home she used to share with him and, save for the company of her three-year-old retriever, Buttons – whose golden ears I get a glimpse of as she nuzzles her nose into Krissy’s lap for a head scratch – she spent the lockdowns alone. ‘It was really hard. I felt really lonely. I think that’s why I turned to the community,’ she says. To add structure to the monotony, she created a free two-week workout challenge, which she shared on Facebook, and took a diligent approach to her own exercise regime, too. ‘As a trainer, the best
‘Lockdown was hard. I felt really lonely. I think that’s why I turned to the community’
way I know to relieve my stress is training. You know, I can pick up heavy shit or I can sprint as fast as I can – it’s an escape.’ She works out five or six days a week, usually in the evening at home, and never for more than an hour – and she practises what she preaches. During the week, she’ll follow her own Sculpt It plan, then do heavy lifting at the weekend. ‘I’m lucky enough to have weights at home because I actually ordered them prior to the first lockdown,’ she says. ‘I was trying to make the house feel more like mine, and I was like, “I need a little mini gym in here.” I’ll do loads of compounds [multi-muscle lifts like squats and deadlifts], and lift as heavy as I possibly can.’
Heavy lifting seems to be Krissy’s MO in all spheres – in 2020, she launched her own activewear line, Oner Active, and penned a
book, Do This For You (£16.99, Aster) – and it’s especially true when it comes to Tone & Sculpt. Last year, she welcomed another trainer into the mix, Chicagobased PT Danyele Wilson – and there are more on the cards, she promises, grinning as she refuses to give me any hints about who. ‘These are women who really believe in the Tone & Sculpt pillars,’ is all she’ll say. What are the pillars, then? ‘Accessibility, longevity and inclusivity,’ she beams as she launches into her perfectly polished elevator pitch. The workouts will continue to be easy to follow from home or a gym, and the plans will always be sustainable. ‘We’re never going to offer a quick-fix shredding programme,’ she says, practically shuddering at the thought. ‘And, finally, inclusivity. We want to be the app that’s for every woman – and potentially men in the future – but also an app that’s inclusive with our trainers. We want to showcase different types of trainers, different methods of training – to be an app where someone will come in and go, that’s the trainer for me. That’s the style of training for me.’
Her energy is infectious. As she talks, I’m reminded of something she said earlier in our conversation, about having to work twice as hard to feel like she belongs. Does she still feel that way? ‘It’s important for people to know that my life isn’t just a pretty picture. It’s taken hard work to get to where I am. And for people to understand that whatever they do, they can truly achieve anything with hard work.’
With the Slack notifications that have provided the soundtrack to our interview becoming increasingly insistent, I’m aware I can monopolise her time no longer. Before Krissy goes back to work (where else?), I turn her own question back on her and ask after her ‘why’. Unlike me, she doesn’t have to scrabble around for it. ‘Training makes me feel strong and confident,’ she explains. ‘It makes me
‘Training makes me feel strong and confident – it relaxes me’
happy, and it relaxes me – it’s my therapy. It adds structure and routine to my life. It keeps me accountable and focused.’ Call it plagiarism, but I think she’s just articulated mine, too. Motivation now present and correct, I leave the meeting, roll out my mat and get to work.